After the PhD

For some PhD graduates, transitioning to employment can be harder than attaining their degree. Business consultant Anna Harrison’s book From Scholar to Dollar addresses the challenge for many people with higher degrees and provides tips from Anna’s experience in academia and commercial consulting.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: All those PhDs with all those hopes. But in 2015, where are the jobs? Do we not want to invest in wealth creation? This is Anna Harrison with an educated view, and a book.

Anna Harrison: The futility of higher education is a topic that has received much press attention in the last few years. In 2010, The Economist published a now popular article entitled 'The Disposable Academic'. The article described the dissatisfaction and disappointment that many PhD students feel after completing their coveted degree. It painted a picture of brilliant people who, after years of dedication and hard work, emerge without the skills to land their dream job. Ironically, I happened to read this article about five minutes after leaving my established consulting practice in the US and enrolling in the PhD program at QUT in Brisbane.

Now, I will openly confess to being somewhat of an education romantic. Deep in my core, I passionately believe in the value of education, not only for its transformative power at the individual level, but also at the larger collective level. In my eyes, education remains society's best tool for resolving complex global issues and eradicating ignorance and intolerance.

Despite my amorous vision of education, as I navigated my own PhD journey, I found myself agreeing with that article in The Economist. I was surrounded by brilliant people who did not have the skills to allow their brilliance to shine. Rather than discredit the value of education or blame the academic system, I decided to write a book to address this problem.

Having spent nearly half of my adult life in academic environments, I was struck with a great change that occurred in universities over the 15 years that I was entrenched in commercial consulting. By 2010, when I re-entered academia, the vibe of 'knowledge for knowledge sake' was well and truly over. There was a complete change in university culture. The brown paper bag lunches and collegiate banter that defined departmental lunchrooms in the '90s were replaced by academics working in silos, jockeying ferociously for grants that amounted to peanuts in the consulting world. It was not uncommon for a newly graduated academic to spend weeks drafting grant applications for sums of a few thousand dollars. These grants were so competitive, that the success rate hovered at 10% to 25%. Even I could figure out that the kid flipping burgers at McDonald's was making more per hour than these well-educated, freshly minted Doctors of Philosophy. I was completely intrigued as to what was causing this phenomenon.

What I discovered is that the changes in the academic ecosystem had dramatically altered the skills that were needed to thrive in the university environment. What was interesting, however, is that a similar issue was occurring in industry: technological advances, reduced time to market and erosion of barriers to entry were changing the skills needed to survive in the business world.

By 2013, the players on both sides of the academic-industry fence were lacking critical skills. Skills that fell outside of the scope of traditional university curricula. To many people, possessing a set of skills falls into one of two buckets. Either one is talented and has the skill, or one is not and lacks the skill. I too held onto this belief, until I came across Malcolm Gladwell's concept of '10,000 hours'.

According to Gladwell, one of the factors that underpins success in any field is practice. To be precise, 10,000 hours of practice. In other words, given enough time and guidance, anyone could learn a new skill, even the subset of brilliant PhD students identified by The Economist as popping Prozac and staring down the possibility of working the supermarket graveyard shift. But just to be sure that Gladwell was on the right track, I took it upon myself to test his theory.

Although today I run workshops and am invited to give presentations to audiences of several hundred people, in 2011 I had an abject fear of public speaking. This was a skill that was absolutely not in my talent bucket, it was at the very outer edge of my comfort zone, which of course made it a perfect test subject. Over the course of a year I obsessively focused on improving my speaking skills, clocking up quite a large number of hours, and succeeding. The experience taught me that it really was possible to learn and refine the auxiliary skills that are critical to career success.

I have had the privilege of working with brilliant people. Although many of these people have lacked the 15 auxiliary skills described in my book, they have all shared an important trait: the ability to learn fast, given the right guidance.

My book, From Scholar to Dollar, was written to provide this guidance. The book distils two decades of academic, consulting and life experience into a set of 15 simple steps that can be followed by anyone wishing to make a transition to post-degree success.

In my work coaching corporate teams, I'm often asked as to which of the 15 auxiliary skills are the most important. Arguably, although the most critical skill is learning to articulate value in the currency of one's audience, by far the most controversial is number 5: always dress well, look good and take yourself seriously.

From Scholar to Dollar is available for free through iBooks and from the book's website: FromScholarToDollar.com. Thank you and I wish all post docs the best in their personal journey to post-degree success.

Robyn Williams: Anna Harrison, formerly at the Queensland University of technology, From Scholar to Dollar, and as you heard it's free.

Guests

Anna Harrison

Business ConsultantBrisbane

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Comments (3)

Chris :

20 Dec 2014 6:19:26pm

I finished a PhD in 1990, after first graduating in medicine. I worked for about 15 years in universities before deciding to go back to medicine. I think it's very much a young person's business these days because it's so tough. I found most people just pumped papers and research grants out with no real substance to anything they were doing. Unfortunately this is how you get on in science these days. I never really played this game but I knew I couldn't survive much longer unless I did. I don't know how to reform the system, but it is clear that something needs to be done to encourage real science rather than stamp-collecting. Richard Smith has been writing about this problem recently in the BMJ and he's well worth a read:

Peter Thompson :

21 Dec 2014 9:59:59am

Anne refers to Malcolm Gladwell's "theory" relating to 10,000 hours of practice needed for develping true expertise in a skill. However, I think she'll find that this idea came from the research of K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, and that Gladwell is merely reporting.

If that's the case, it would be good for someone who no doubt values the academic tradition of appropriate attribution to ensure that the researchers who did the work get commensurate recognition.

Anna Harrison :

22 Dec 2014 8:14:38pm

Peter, thanks for your comment: strictly speaking, you are correct - as a journalist, Gladwell reported on Ericsson’s work, he was not a key researcher on theories of expertise. Your comment actually raises an interesting point that speaks to the core message in the book: that is, the importance of articulating value in the currency of one’s audience.Although Gladwell was not a key inventor, his ability to report relevant research in an accessible way delivered the “theory of 10,000” hours to millions of people around the world (Outliers has sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide). My reference to Gladwell and 10,000 hours was a way to communicate a lot of scientific theory (Ericsson et al.'s work) in a way that made it instantly understandable to a wide audience. Thus, although your point is correct, I feel it misses the bigger picture: it is not always the inventor whose ideas are remembered, but the person who has the skills to present the science in the currency of the audience. To me, making science accessible strengthens, rather than weakens, the diffusion of knowledge… would you agree? Anna

The Making of an Expert by Ericsson et al., Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expertOutliers by Malcolm Gladwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)